Media transport is a key component of media delivery between the content provider and the end consumer. Given that nowadays video consumes most of Internet traffic, we hereby use video as a representative of the media of all formats. The present principles can be applied to other media formats, such as audio.
Media transport has been an area of great interest in both academia and industry. Several international industrial standard specifications have been developed to provide guidance for implementation, such as MPEG-2 Transport System (TS), Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), and MPEG Media Transport (MMT). Some of these specifications have already been implemented in existing systems, such as YouTube and Netflix. However, these standard specifications mainly focus on the forward streaming protocol/architecture, i.e., communications from the content provider (or the cloud edge server) to the end user. In other words, the legacy media transport schemes mainly focus on the one-way (unidirectional) communication.
Recent advances in media delivery and consumption demonstrate that two-way (bidirectional) communications such as virtual reality interaction are desirable. Thus, not only the forward streaming (e.g., from the media server or the cloud edger server to the end user), but also the backward feedback inputs (e.g., from the end user to the media server or the cloud edge server) are needed for the next generation of media transport. Our invention discloses several input messages that could be introduced and implemented into the existing media transport schemes to refine and improve the interactive media transport.